I’m Doing the Best I Can (for Myself): Leadership and Variance of Harvesting in Resource Dilemmas

Previous research on social dilemmas has shown that leadership can be an effective means to supervise a common resource and that group members prefer a leader when confronted with high variance between group members’ harvests. In this article, the authors investigate how leaders and followers react to variance. The results of an experimental study indicate that leaders are especially likely to harvest more than followers (and to deviate from the optimal harvest) when there is high variance between group members’ harvests. Moreover, this role effect was explained, at least partly, by the fact that compared with followers, leaders felt more entitled to higher harvests. The findings suggest that assigning leadership may, under certain situations, lead to inefficiency in managing the common resource.